Recently, a 14 year old boy shot himself in the head in the boys’ restroom at his central Florida middle school. His family had moved here all the way from New York to escape bullies. Turns out you can’t end bullying by moving hundreds of miles. You can’t end bullying by talking to school administrators or teachers.

You can’t end bullying by fighting and punishing bullies because fighting and punishing IS bullying. Imagine firefighters trying to put out fires with flamethrowers instead of water hoses or buckets of earth.

The most common problem I’ve encountered is what I will indelicately term the ‘bully factor.’It’s always deliberate, if perhaps unconscious.It’s simply a fact of life that some voices carry more weight than others.And it has nothing to do with volume.

A video making the rounds on the social media circuit got me thinking. It showed a couple of Christian protesters, armed with signs, who showed up at a gay pride parade in Seattle … where they were confronted by several people involved in the parade.

The confrontation wasn’t pretty. In fact, it turned violent. One woman on the video can be seen pushing a street preacher with a Bible in his hand; later, several other people rip a sign from the second preacher’s hands and proceed to tearmit apart. Then another person barrels into the crowd and proceeds to start punching the man with the sign before police arrive to restore order.